Monday, March 31, 2008

Bestselling British writer Lee Child on creating one of the most popular heroes of current crime thrillers: Jack Reacher, ex US army special investigator, who returns in Child's new novel Nothing to Lose.

Mark Lawson investigating the life and work of the leading Victorian detective Jack Whicher, in the light of a new book by Kate Summerscale. Whicher's most famous case inspired novelists such as Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins.

David Eick is writing a pilot script for a TV version of Children of Men.

The story originated with P.D. James's science-fiction novel and was adapted for film in 2006 with Clive Owen in the lead role.

Eick, who steered the Battlestar Galactia and Bionic Woman remakes, is looking to make the proposed series a faithful adaptation of the book.

"It's really taking root more in the origins of the novels in that it will focus on the cultural movement in which young people become the society's utter focus," he explained to Sci Fi Wire.

"Much like our culture, whenever Lindsay Lohan does something [and] it becomes the headline of every news show, it's about how, when you don't have a responsibility to the next generation and you're free to do whatever you want, where do you draw the line?"

Eick added that the pilot would differ from the film and explore ideas of social responsibility and freedom.

"It's a very compelling, human question that science-fiction has always explored extremely provocatively," he said. "It's not really a war show like the movie was. It's more an exploration of that issue."

Friday, March 28, 2008

...on a visit to the Random House archive at Rushden, Northants, searching for out-of-print titles with re-issue potential for the Vintage Classics series, Vintage/Pimlico Editor Alison Hennessey's eye was caught by “an odd little book with an amazing jacket”.

It transpired it was a little-known crime novel, The Red House Mystery, by A A Milne whose name is now indelibly linked to his children's stories, When We Were Very Young and Winnie-the-Pooh. First published by Methuen in 1922, it will reach a new generation of readers when it is published as a Vintage Classic in November.

“Rushden is a huge, amazing place, with so many lost gems,” Hennessey told PN. “I was sorry to leave. The Milne book was one of many on the shelves and it just leapt out at me. It has an interesting history, because apparently Milne deliberately set out to write what he called 'the perfect detective story'.”

The Red House Mystery, republished in several other editions since it first appeared and still available as a print-on-demand title in the US, was Milne's only detective story in which “secret passages, uninvited guests, a sinister valet and a puzzling murder lay the foundations for a classic crime caper”. It will be published in the Vintage Classics series on 6 November, price £10.

Thursday, March 27, 2008

Spanish author Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s latest novel, which will be published on April 17 with an initial print run of a million copies, will be titled “El juego del ángel” (The Angel’s Game), the Planeta publishing group announced.

The new novel, part of a tetralogy that began with the wildly successful “La sombra del viento” (The Shadow of the Wind), will set a record in Spain for most copies published in a first print run, Planeta said.

Ruiz Zafón, who was born in Barcelona in 1964, will present “El juego del ángel” to the media at an event in Barcelona a day before the novel is published.

The new work by the Spanish writer, whose books have sold some 10 million copies and been published in more than 50 countries, will arrive in bookstores seven years after the release of his previous novel, “La sombra del viento.”

Set in Barcelona in the 1920s, “El juego del ángel” – like its predecessor – will feature a locale known as the “Cemetery of Forgotten Books,” a secret library for the safekeeping of old, barely remembered titles.

There's no mention of an English language version on his UK website, yet...

#3 Back to BNS, hopped on to super fast Virgin Pendalino to London Euston. Texted Maxine to say I'd be 30 mins early. Pendalino not so fast, 20 mins late due to "points problem" followed by "signals problem". Met Maxine 20 mins earlier than planned.

#4 It's now 4pm. Marylebone back to Birmingham. Departure boards showing trains running back to Moor Street, hoo-rah. Swiftly followed by announcement that trains terminating at Dorridge (10 miles or so outside Birmingham). Hmm. Just before train gets into Banbury driver advises passengers for Birmingham to change at Banbury and pick up Cross Country train.

#5 Banbury to BNS. Train arrives at BNS 23 mins late due to congestion at Coventry.

#6 BNS to Redditch. Train left BNS a few mins late but nothing out of the usual there. I heave sigh of relief, text Maxine to say I should be home at 7.30pm. But no...train arrives at Barnt Green station (8 miles from Redditch) and is terminated there due to "signalling problem". Eventually train reverses back one stop (now 10 miles from Redditch) and passengers are advised a replacement bus service is waiting. 25 min wait later in rain and dark, still no bus. Finally the great train god takes pity on us and ...

#7 a train arrives and takes us all to Redditch, arriving at 8.30pm, an hour and ten mins late.

And of course the trains had been in chaos over Easter due to Engineering works...

November 13th, 1934The Breslau-Oppeln train was two minutes late, which to Mock, who was used to the punctuality of German trains, seemed unpardonable. (It's no surprise that in a state governed by Austrian sergeants, everything breaks down.)

Simone van der Vlugt's The Reunion is to be published in English for the first time next month by Text Publishing in Australia.

Synopsis:When I read back through my diaries or listen to Robin's stories, I come across completely unknown events, as if another person lived that time in my place. And still, a recollection can suddenly knife its way through my mind, a spark that lights up the grey matter of my memory.

If you could go back, what would you say to your younger self? Would you reach out and hug her?

Sabine was fifteen when Isabel disappeared - isolated at school and tormented by her former friend. What if she'd seen something back then, nine years ago, the day of Isabel's disappearance? What if she'd blocked it out almost entirely? What if her memory was returning to her? And what if it was dangerous?

This riveting and disturbing psychological thriller will appeal to fans of Nicci French and Ruth Rendell. Simone van der Vlugt draws characters brilliantly, and builds tension with the touch of a master as the novel draws to its unexpected and terrifying conclusion.

The Reunion is the author's first adult novel having written several young adult books before. Part of her website is available in English. The Reunion is listed on the Australian bookshop, Abbeys but not yet on the Australian Online Bookshop(I've used the latter before to order Kerry Greenwood books.)

Given Anthony Minghella's unforgivably early death last week, I shall pass briefly over his last work, The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. Under his direction, this adaptation of Alexander McCall Smith's original novel looked beautiful. The Botswana Tourist Board will be chuffed. The problem is that Precious Ramotswe does not really live in Africa but in a verbal universe that is McCall Smith's own. His dialogue, so natural on the page, turned out to be unutterable, at least by the actors assembled here, who struggled to attain end-of-term play standards. The sentimentality also seemed raised. I choose to blame Minghella's co-writer, Richard Curtis.

I've blogged before about the reimagining of Enid Blyton's Famous Five but I wasn't quite prepared for this, from The Times:

Blyton’s characters are being revived in a series of books, accompanied by an animated television series, screened on the Disney Channel. They still stop for lashings of ginger beer and are accompanied by their faithful dog, still called Timmy, but much has changed since the quintet first investigated Treasure Island in 1942.

Famous Five: On the Case introduces the children of Blyton’s original adventurers. Rumours that George nurtured sapphic tendencies proved wide of the mark. Her Anglo-Indian daughter Jo, short for Jyoti (Hindi for “light”), is the new team leader.

Wimpish Anne became a successful California art dealer and produced Allie, a shopping-obsessed Malibu girl who shares her mother’s disdain for dangerous antics. Dick’s son, Dylan, peruses the Japanese stock market for opportunities to make a quick yen.

The five — now with wireless laptop — are packed off to the Devon moors and are soon on the trail of smugglers. But they encounter a most sinister threat on their first adventure. A phoney environmentalist is running a DVD bootlegging operation from Shelter Island — just the kind of activity that is threatening Disney’s profits.

Our heroes discover that the DVDs are embedded with subliminal messages that brainwash children into craving Fudge Fries candy. The villain is brought to book.

Read the rest of the article and the (mostly up in arms) comments here.

Thursday, March 20, 2008

HAVING ACQUIRED FORMER MI5 chief Stella Rimington for the fourth novel in her Liz Carlyle series - following three previous bestsellers published by Random House - Quercus is planning to re-position her to appeal to a more female readership when it publishes Dead Line in October with a striking female image on the jacket. It is the latest example of a publisher seeking to boost its market for a particular author by altering the jacket and overall packaging. Little, Brown is currently planning to reposition Nora Roberts to make her appeal to a broader audience, following research which showed that her readers weren't happy with her being solely billed as romance.

“Women are heavy readers of crime novels, and we believe there is an untapped market for women buying thrillers,” says Quercus Sales Director David Murphy. “Stella's novels have a strong female character, but we believe women readers may have been put off by the masculine look of her previous books.” Rimington's editor at Quercus, Jane Wood, adds: “Random House did a brilliant job with Stella, but as the first woman Director General of MI5 with great appeal herself to women as a role model, and writing about a strong female heroine, she should have strong appeal to women who like to read thrillers.” There will also be a filmed interview with Rimington for David Freeman's Meet the Author website to be shot in the apartment of Quercus Chairman Anthony Cheetham, once owned by Sir Winston Churchill.

The challenge for Quercus is to reach a new female readership without alienating the core male market for thriller fiction.

I was shocked to read earlier today about the death of director and screenwriter Anthony Minghella, aged 54. It seems he'd recently been operated on for cancer of the neck and tonsils. Of late he'd been at work on the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency film. Read his obituary on the BBC website.

Previously on Euro Crime, the Scandinavia books page comprised authors, and their bibliographies, from Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. After a bit of re-jigging, it now also includes authors from Iceland. Plus there are now separate pages for authors from Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden as well as the existing Iceland page.

The July-December 2008 catalogue from Serpent's Tail lists a new title in translation from the late Manuel Vazquez Montalban. The second in his long running Pepe Carvalho series, Tattoo, originally published in 1974, will be published in English in August.

Synopsis:Pepe Carvalho, ex-cop, ex-marxist and constant gourmet, is working as a private detective in Barcelona, when a body is pulled out of the sea, its face so badly destroyed that the only way of identifying it is through a tattoo that says: 'Born to raise hell in hell'. A local hairdresser hires Carvalho to find out who the man is. Meanwhile, the Barcelona police make a connection between the murder and local drug dealers and prostitutes, and they begin raiding bars and brothels.A lead on the identity of the murdered man brings Carvalho to Amsterdam, where he gets entangled with a drug gang. As the pace accelerates, Carvalho realises that this is no straightforward John Doe case.

In an interview (undated) with the Australian journal SCAN, Serpent's Tail publisher, Peter Ayrton, confirmed his commitment to publishing more Montalban:

SCAN: One wonderful crime writer you have translated is Manuel Montalban who sadly died in a Thai airport while changing planes on his way back to Europe after a recent visit to Australia and New Zealand. You've published several of his books, most recently The Buenos Aires Quartet, in which Pepe heads off to Argentina. There are several other books in that series still not translated, from the first to the last. Do you have plans to bring out more?

PA: It's great really that we are slowly establishing the Pepe series and actually selling Montalban's books. It's a long process. Word of mouth helps when people talk to their friends and everything, and it's been helped by having some of the books published by Duffy and Snellgrove. It helps here to have an Australian publisher, I should think. And what a great character Pepe is! Montalban loved food, sex and radical politics, so he had his priorities in life right! And these are only his crime novels we're discussing; he wrote other novels, non-fiction books and had a weekly column for El Pais. His literary production was phenomenal. Yes, we'll be doing the first one in the Pepe series, I Killed Kennedy, and at least two others, The Man of My Life, and Tattoos, at the rate of one a year. The remaining books in the series are uneven but those three are very good.

As well as the fact that The Man of My Life came out in 2005, the following comments make the interview seem a bit dated, given the current enthusiasm for crime in translation:

SCAN: In the past you have said that it's a hard-sell to persuade people to read crime novels in translation; why is that?

PA: There are particular problems about crime in translation; a lot of crime books have a lot of street slang and that's always a serious problem for the translator. In a way it's easier to translate literary fiction than it is genre fiction. The other problem is that there are so many good American and British crime writers that the market isn't desperately crying out for translated works.

Here are a couple of snippets from the Book Depository interview of author, R J Ellory, whose fifth book, A Quiet Belief in Angels was selected for this year's Richard & Judy bookclub:

MT: What does it mean to you to be on the Richard & Judy list?

RJE: It has been unimaginable. Truly! To put it in perspective, the paperback print run for my last novel City of Lies was something in the region of 7500 copies. Yesterday I received a call to say that another print run of A Quiet Belief had been authorised, which now brings the total number of copies in circulation to 193,000.

MT: What draws you to crime-writing Roger?

RJE: The simple fact of putting an ordinary individual into an extraordinary situation. The vast majority of us never have to deal with bank robberies and murders and suchlike. For me it has always been the challenge of representing the nature of people, how people deal with difficult and trying situations, how they cope with the tougher aspects of being human. A wonderful lady at the Bookseller Magazine called Sarah Broadhurst once said that I didn’t write crime fiction as such, I wrote ‘human dramas, but always in some way focused around a crime’, and I think that’s possibly the best description that was ever given of what I am trying to do.

Tom Rob Smith is the current focus of the New and Emerging Authors section on Amazon.co.uk. You can read the first chapter of Child 44 there plus there's an exclusive (but short) interview with the man himself, 44 Stalinist statistics and a discussion forum (currently quiet).

Friday, March 14, 2008

The good news about being a bit late in the 'game' as it were, (this came out last November), is that it's now only £6.99 at HMV.

Summary:Can you solve Agatha Christie's classic murder mystery, After The Funeral? Take Poirot's challenge to find clues hidden in this unique Murder Mystery DVD game! Entertainment for all the family - play a series of exciting games and puzzles to test your detective skills in 'observation', 'analysis' and 'intuition' as you try to identify the murderer!

DVD Extras:Exclusive New Footage Of David Suchet As The World-Famous Detective Hercule PoirotOver 40 Minutes Of After The Funeral TV Movie Footage9 Different Puzzle Types - Different Each Time You Play!

The customer reviews on amazon are a bit mixed, it seems that though there are different puzzles, the murderer is always the same and it helps if you can't remember the tv show/book! Still £6.99 for a few hours entertainment can't be bad.

Hat tip to Philip on the yahoo group, British Mysteries, as he's just posted that P D James will have a new Dalgleish book out in September, called The Private Patient.

Update

Draft blurb:"When the notorious investigative journalist, Rhoda Gradwyn, booked into Mr Chandler-Powell's private clinic in Dorset for the removal of a disfiguring and long-standing facial scar, she had every prospect of a successful operation by a distinguished surgeon, a week's peaceful convalescence in one of Dorset's most beautiful manor houses and the beginning of a new life. She was never to leave Cheverell Manor alive. Dalgliesh and his team are called in to investigate the murder, and later a second death, which are to raise even more complicated problems than the question of innocence or guilt.

A new detective novel by P D James is always keenly awaited and The Private Patient will undoubtedly equal the success of her world-wide best-seller, The Lighthouse. It displays the qualities which P D James's readers have come to expect: a masterly psychological and emotional richness of characterisation, a vivid evocation of place and a credible and exciting mystery. The Private Patient is a powerful work of contemporary fiction."

Other than Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith, the other two main books getting the reviews in the last week or so are the ones featuring the 'real life' writers, Josephine Tey and Daphne du Maurier. Nicola Upson's An Expert in Murder is getting higher praise than Daphne by Justine Picardie. The Sunday Times was quite damning about the latter, calling it "this baggy, repetitive and inert slab of pseudo-fiction".

The links to all the recent reviews and articles in the UK papers can be found here.

Rory Clements' MARTYR, a first historical thriller pitched as in the vein of CJ Sansom, about John Shakespeare, chief intelligencer to Queen Elizabeth, ordered to protect England's "sea dragon" Francis Drake from an assassination plot, to Kate Miciak at Bantam Dell, by Patty Moosbrugger at Patricia Moosbrugger Literary Agency (NA).

JRR Tolkien's grandson Simon Tolkien's THE INHERITANCE, in which an aging police inspector decides to travel from England to France to delve into a possible World War II theft and crime hoping to save an upper-class student set to hang for murdering his father, an Oxford historian with a questionable military record, to Peter Wolverton and Thomas Dunne at Thomas Dunne Books, in a two-book deal, by Marly Rusoff of Marly Rusoff & Associates (NA).

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Julia McKenzie will make her debut in A Pocket Full of Rye and as usual for Agatha Christie productions a hoard of well known actors will be joining her including Rupert Graves, Matthew McFadyen, Helen Baxendale, Wendy Richard and Ralf Little. From Yahoo:

A Pocket Full of Rye will see Miss Marple trying to solve her most compelling case yet.

Wealthy businessman Rex Fortescue (Kenneth Craham) collapses after his breakfast, poisoned by an extract from yew berries. A pocketful of rye is found in his jacket. Nobody seems too upset, as Rex was universally disliked as a tyrant, especially by his children.

Inspector Neele (McFadyen) is despatched to the house to investigate. Maid Gladys who was trained by Miss Marple, is acting strangely, and writes to her former employer for help. Yet the call for help has come too late: Rex's glamorous and cheating young wife also falls foul of the poisoner. And Gladys is found strangled, a peg on her nose.

The case appears to be echoing the children's rhyme 'Sing A Song of Sixpence'. The question is: who will be next?

Graves and McFadyen appeared together in last year's Death at the Funeral, (along with Keeley Hawes from Ashes to Ashes):

The Oxford Murders, based on the book by Argentine author Guillermo Martinez, will be out in UK cinemas on the 26th March (according to Wikipedia) or 25th April (according to IMDB). The actors involved include John Hurt, Elijah Wood, Anna Massey and Torchwood's Burn Gorman.

Synopsis from Wikipedia: November 1993. Wood plays Martin, an American student at Oxford University who wants Arthur Seldom (Hurt) as his thesis director. In a public lecture, Seldom quotes Wittgenstein's Tractatus to deny the possibility of truth. Martin contests asserting his faith in the mathematics under reality. Later, Martin and Seldom coincide and find Martin's landlady (also a friend of Seldom's) murdered. Seldom declares to the police that he had received a note with his friend's address marked as "the first of a series". As Seldom is an authority on logical series, he suspects that a serial murderer is defying his intelligence. Martin, Seldom and Lorna (Leonor Watling), a Spanish nurse, will try to guess the following terms of the series as murders continue.

Watch the English language trailer below:

Guillermo Martinez's next book available in English, The Book of Murder, will be on sale from 1 May.

Monday, March 10, 2008

I've seen the trailer for the No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency film that's going to be on the BBC over Easter (Monday I think). I can't find a version online yet. But I did find that there are plans for a further 13 hour-long episodes. From Hollywood.com:

HBO has retained the services of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency.

The cable network has ordered 13 hour-long episodes based on the best-selling crime books by Alexander McCall Smith, with shooting to begin in the summer. That's in addition to the two-hour pilot that Anthony Minghella recently shot in Botswana from a script he wrote with Richard Curtis.

The Rap Sheet has the full list of winners and nominees for this year's LCC Awards. Of European interest is ex-pat author Rhys Bowen who was nominated for the Dilys Award and won The Arty (for best cover art on a mystery novel published in 2007) for Her Royal Spyness.

By coincidence I picked this up last Friday at my local library and added it to my enormous library books pile, culled from two library services.

Her Royal Spyness is also nominated in the Best Novel category of the Agathas.

You can read an excerpt on amazon.com. Her Royal Spyness will be out in paperback in July and the follow-up A Royal Pain is out in hardback, also in July.

Apparently last week's interview with Tom Rob Smith on Radio 4's Front Row will now be aired today instead.

Front Row is on at 19-15 to 19.45 and you can listen again for 7 more days after the date of broadcast.

The description from last week:

Child 44Mark Lawson talks to British crime writer Tom Rob Smith, whose novel Child 44 has been hyped as Gorky Park for the 21st century in its portrayal of a Russian policeman searching for a child serial killer in modern Moscow.

At HCUK, Wayne Brookes has paid a six-figure sum for two novels by Will Adams, whose debut The Alexander Cipher was published last winter. Brookes, who bought from Luigi Bonomi, praises the author's ability “to weave fascinating fact into adrenalin- packed fiction” in the Clive Cussler mode.

The Courier-Mail recently ran an article/review on The Alexander Cipher.

Friday, March 07, 2008

This one passed me by completely when it was released in cinemas last year, however the review in the Metro DVD section has finally made me aware of it.

Synopsis: Following a near-death experience,Yella (Nina Hoss) flees her eastern German hometown, failed marriage and broken dreams to start over again in Hanover. By chance she finds work with ambitious and determined young executive Philipp (Devid Striesow) and enters a ruthless world of big business and cut-throat boardroom deals for which she finds her looks, quick wits and icy demeanour major assets. But just as Yella seems poised to fully realise her ambitions, she finds herself haunted by truths from the past that threaten to destroy her new life. Featuring an enigmatic performance from Nina Hoss in the title role, Christian Petzold's stylish new film is both compelling thriller and an unsettling mystery that grips until right until its stunning denouement.

Read the Metro review and watch the trailer (in German) on YouTube. Birmingham Library has a copy so I look forward to getting hold of it in due course. I have Tell No One lined up for the Easter holiday (fingers crossed).

The Euro Crime band of reviewers continues to do sterling work over on the reviews page on the website but could do with some help as the requests for reviews are coming thick and fast via email and in the parcel safe.

I'm particularly after reviewers who enjoy: the Da Vinci Code/Sam Bourne type of book, psychological crime and also the noir end of the crime spectrum.

So if you're in the UK and fancy reviewing the occasional (or more!) book, do pop over to the website, have a look round and drop me an email. (NB. Euro Crime just covers British and European crime fiction.)

If you're outside the UK and would like to help out on the reviews page by reviewing your own books then please do get in touch.

In case you missed the story yesterday, Lee Child's brother, Andrew Grant, has secured a 'significant' publishing deal. His first book will be called Even and is due to be published in the US in June 2009:

Younger brother of Lee Child, Andrew Grant's debut EVEN, introducing David Trevellyan, described as Jack Reacher's younger brother if Reacher had a brother who'd joined the British Navy, and taken James Bond's career path, to Peter Wolverton at Thomas Dunne Books, in a significant deal, in a pre-empt, for publication in June 2009, by Janet Reid at FinePrint Literary Management

Tuesday, March 04, 2008

John le Carré, the British writer of literary spy thrillers, has returned to a previous publisher for his forthcoming novel, "A Most Wanted Man." Le Carré has signed a one-book deal with Scribner, a unit of Simon & Schuster, for the United States rights to the novel, which will be simultaneously published in Britain (by Hodder & Stoughton) in October. Le Carré is leaving Little, Brown & Co., the publisher of his last two books, "The Mission Song" and "Absolute Friends," and returning to Scribner, which published "Single & Single" and "The Constant Gardener." The new novel is set in Germany and chronicles the fate of a Muslim man who moves to Hamburg to enroll in medical school but because of his murky background ends up being followed by both local and other Western intelligence agencies.

I blogged before about Murder Most Famous a reality tv show where 'celebrities' compete to publish a crime novel. The winner will be published in next year's 'Quick Reads' series which are published to promote reading and aimed at the irregular or less confident reader.

The programme started yesterday afternoon and runs every afternoon this week. It doesn't seem to be repeated on the BBCiplayer but the BBC website has some video diaries and writing tips from Minette.

The trailer for the film edition of Let the Right One In is now available on youtube and looks very exciting indeed. The author (John Ajvide Lindqvist) will be in the UK for the premiere of the film later this year, while his next novel Handling the Undead will be published by Quercus in September 2008.

Yesterday's subject of Radio 3's Private Passions was psychologist and author Frank Tallis:

Michael Berkeley meets Dr Frank Tallis, a clinical psychologist specialising in obsessive-compulsive disorders who has also achieved success as a writer of detective novels. His Liebermann series of books is set in Vienna at the turn of the 20th century, where his young doctor hero, a disciple of Freud, helps to solve complex crimes through the use of radical analytical techniques.

Frank is interested in all the arts of the period, but particularly music, and pieces by Mahler and Zemlinsky feature among his choices, as well as vocal music by Gesualdo and Rachmaninov and a Viennese-sounding waltz from a film score by Takemitsu.

Maxine Clarke is unimpressed by Meltdown by Martin Baker (which seems to have had a lot of money spent on the marketing) calling it a "mechanically insipid effort" but she gives a suggestion for a better read in her review;

Maxine finds the latest Tony Hill book by Val McDermid, Beneath the Bleeding a thrilling read, only let down by the "ludicrous motivation" of the bad guy;

Saturday, March 01, 2008

This week's Film 2008 featured Ian Rankin talking about Hitchcock's early films made before his glittering Hollywood career. There's also an interview with Jason Statham and Ross' thoughts on The Bank Job, the latest British crime film.

Watch Film 2008 for the next few days on BBCiplayer. The Ian Rankin piece is about 6 mins in and The Bank Job, 20 mins in.

I've just uploaded the now up to date 'News' page. The Scotsman is the first newspaper (I've found) to review Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith, saying this about it:

The phrase "master storyteller" is horribly over-used. In the case of young, first-time novelist Tom Rob Smith, it simply cannot do him justice. Child 44 is not only a thriller of the highest quality – addictive, pacey, frighteningly unpredictable – but also a magnificently written novel with far more to offer than carefully managed tension and twists.

Links to this review and other reviews and articles are on the News page.